A friend of mine felt very unhappy after he read an article in The Independent earlier this month. The article covered the recently released report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development concerning the Johannesburg metropolitan area. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/gauteng/living-in-gauteng-has-hefty-price-tag-1.1190254?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot
My friend felt stung by the opening paragraph of the article: “Gauteng…

As you open your gifts this festive season, or tuck into your dinner, take a moment to think about the extent to which free markets have made this possible. Probably, people from all over the globe have been involved in helping you enjoy your day; people you don’t know and…

In considering the general state of the South African economy, it is essential that we should recognise that South Africa is a middle level performer. While it is not one of the high flyers, what used, absurdly, to be called miracles, it is even further from the basket cases, and…

Last week, the amendments to the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act (PPPFA) came into effect. The new amended Act gives the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) the power to cherry-pick certain sectors and products within the South African economy for special privileges. More specifically, states the Act, “An organ…

Attorney Gary Moore was recently asked to explain the restriction that current critics of the government’s land policy are talking about when they say that the government in substance imposes on blacks the same land-tenure restrictions as were imposed under apartheid. Mr Moore responded:
“We explain this as follows. The government…

For most of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short. If you wanted something from your ‘neighbour’ you simply took it – with force if necessary. With no laws to guard the fruits of your labour or any property that you may have acquired, you lived in constant fear…

Should we return to the gold standard? With Congress getting ready to pay for 40 per cent of 2009 federal budget expenditures with money created from thin air, inflation is imminent. Our money will lose its capacity to serve as an honest measure, a meaningful unit of account or to…

The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the Worlds Top Climate Expert is a book about climate change and the claimed thoroughness of the reports issued by the IPCC.
95% of world scientists agree; the science is settled; the time for discussion is over. Such expressions dominate debate on climate change.…

Capitalism, free markets and economic freedom, if these terms are treated as being synonymous, mean that all property and the means of production of goods and services are owned and controlled by individuals. It also means voluntary exchange between individuals free of third party intervention, in other words, individual self-ownership.
It…

We have never heard a poor person, or any other for that matter, complaining about being able to access cheaper goods. And yet so many people in SA love to hate the Chinese for giving us cheaper clothing.
Because local manufacturers cannot produce clothing as efficiently and as cheaply as the…

The FMF published an article more than a year ago saying that it was crisis time in South Africa. The country’s greatest crisis lies in the large-scale unemployment that is causing havoc in the lives of millions of people. The situation has not improved. In fact, it is being made…

According to a Business Day news article by Setumo Stone (Buy-SA bid to channel billions to local companies, 1 Nov. 2011), Business, the government and labour signed an accord on local procurement on Monday, pledging to increase their purchasing of goods and services from South African producers to an "aspirational…

It is a different time and we have a different government but history in this country is being repeated. Labour law in South Africa today is wreaking the same havoc on the millions of unemployed as the 1913 Land Act did on black sharecroppers. Like those victims of the past,…

For the first 19 years of its existence, the Free Market Foundation (FMF) argued, cajoled and pleaded for the total dismantling of the apartheid system and the establishment of true democracy in South Africa, with universal suffrage and a constitution that would highlight the principle of limited government, so…

Governments face difficult decisions in formulating economic policies. Not only do they receive conflicting advice from economists and policy analysts putting forward very different, even totally opposite solutions to economic problems, they also have to contend with sometimes ill-considered or partisan pressure from their political supporters.
Politicians are subject to perverse…

George Orwell could not have predicted when he wrote 1984 that his fictional concept of words being mangled by newspeak to mean their opposites would ever become a reality. Well, it has, right here in South Africa. Just as he imagined that freedom became to mean slavery in his fiction,…